In essence, I’m just remapping which slots go to what and removing the extraneous UI that gets ignored on export anyway. However, I can no longer actually view the normal mapping in 3DStudio, since it takes away my ability to turn on hardware rendering for this material. What else should I be doing?

edit: This is dumb. The material looks correct in the sample swatch, but I just can’t enable the normal maps on the viewport for some reason.

Yeah. I was trying to save some time by just putting together a scripted plugin. I have yet to make shaders for 3DStudio. While I’ve done my share of straight-up CG for Unity and other engines, doing stuff for 3DStudio seems like it requires a lot more effort, and I’m having to play catch-up during crunch time. sigh